SharonA

I eliminated them here w/out baiting but it is fairly manual. I set up a sprinkler-head hose overhead that like a light-moderate rain to saturate the mound and flood a bit underneath (amazing how much water it can take!). Turned the thing off and the colony quickly rebuilt an above-ground mound and moved the queen(s) and eggs up there. Then I scoop up the entire above-ground mound with a shovel and plop it into a bucket half-full of water to which a good squirt of dishwashing liquid had been added to break up the surface tension. Sometimes I don't get the queen and have to do it again later. Depending upon how sensitive you are to their bites, you may want to have the hose on and immediately wash off the handle of the shovel before the ants crawl up it to your hands (and remember to back away) That worked in Texas, too, but they'd come back from neighboring yards after a few months. Ongoing battle.

Yea, if they had been available in a smaller size I'd have jumped at it. Unfortunately I didn't think to collect the fruit/seeds from my own few wild trees before they succumbed to wind/deer/aggressive-right-of-way-clearing. I'd love to get about a dozen, then clear out a few spots along the treeline and line them up. Today might involve getting a post hole digger. My arthritic knees won't let me use a shovel so I've had to dig the holes by hand with a trowel while sitting down, and that's tough going even without having to sift out a big pile of rocks.

Ugh. Finally dig a somewhat-bigger-than-recommended hole for the crabapple, because I wanted to give it plenty of gravel-free room to spread, filled the hole with water to test the drainage, and 30 minutes later the hole still has standing water in it. It drained in reasonable time right up until the surface got down below the level where I'd dug into the solid red Georgia clay. So the poor tree is going to find itself sitting on top of a clay saucer of sorts - but at least it's got a foot+ in each direction rock-free and ready to expand into. This will be a bit of a happy surprise to the poor thing, because right now it is horribly root-bound, over 8' tall and still in a 5 gallon pot with huge cut-off roots poking out of each drainage hole. I'll of course be cutting off the pot rather than pulling it, and teasing out as much of the outer layer of roots as I can so that it starts off right.

I'd forgotten all about this thread This week has been landscaping & garden-y type stuff in between the rounds of wx. No hummingbirds yet. The native jessamine has been blooming for a while, and the invasive Japanese honeysuckle that I'm working on yanking out this year is just starting to bloom. I've got a variety of natives that hummers and pollinators like, all ready to plant when I get to that point in the process. Getting to that point is slow going. It's taken me way too many hours just to dig ONE hole appropriate for replanting a 10-gallon-potted tree. Turns out there was a gravel driveway or pad or something in the area I had picked for the crapapples. I got through the top 2" of years of leaves and some grass - mostly semi-shade grass-natives debris stuff, and hit 4-6" of tightly packed gravel. Getting through THAT was an adventure in stabbity-stab-stab-pry-pry-stab. Then I hit a couple of inches of nice soil, then deep red thick clay. On the bright side, I won't have the big mound of leftover dirt that I often have after removing a lot for a hole and not needing it all to fill in around the transplant afterwards ... I'll have a couple big buckets of gravel instead. It's been nice getting outside in the sun and doing some work. But ouch every part of me aches now.

SVR passing overhead now - my job travels have me in Leawood, KS today ... I'm watching some lovely churning clouds passing overhead and am trying to convince another traveler that we are not going to end up blown away and don't need to go into the storm shelter just yet (I'd expect a LOT more activity here if there was anything particularly juicy expected. Then again, Hutchinson). Lots of high wind and rain on the way. (I didn't see an Obs thread for KS/MO, if you want this and any followup if-something-interesting-happens)

Nope. I've had safe deposit boxes in a number of institutions and they all required use of two keys to access - one held by the customer (me) and the other by the bank. I go in, sign a card/fill out a form that records who accessed it when (one bank always checked my photo ID, others took my word that I was who I claimed to be), sometimes had the signature compared to the one on file, put my key in one lock and they put their key in the other. Even though in theory the paperwork specified who had access to the box, the fine print covered their butts with wording to the effect that "anyone possessing the key is assumed to be authorized to access the box contents", and the ID/signature-check just to make sure it's not someone pretending to be *me*. The signup and disclosure forms made a huge deal out of making sure I knew I had to bring my key every time, they couldn't do it with just their key, and "don't lose your key, we can't open the box. You have to fill out paperwork and pay us in advance a fee to cover both drilling the lock and then replacing it and issuing new keys because that's going to destroy it". Now what would be interesting is how the bank handles this without the backup paperwork ... who/what has the backup copy of the records of who's got what box number, the cards with accountholder info and alternate accesses and access history and so on. My previous bank went from small-local to itty-bitty-branch-of-huge-one to bankrupt-huge-one-gets-bought-by-even-bigger-one, yet the original account open cards, signatures, info, etc, were always in the same beat-up old box in an office that wasn't inside the vault. If this branch had been in Joplin, those records would be in a field a few dozen miles away. Things are quite different with safe deposit boxes vs stuff left at a hotel office, for example. Anyhow, sorry to digress so much. Business continuity after disaster is sort of an interest of mine.

The official stuff: 000 NOUS43 KSGF 242259 AAA PNSSGF KSZ073-097-101-MOZ055>058-066>071-077>083-088>098-101>106-250445-...UPDATED PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SPRINGFIELD MO 559 PM CDT TUE MAY 24 2011 ..EF-5 TORNADO CONFIRMED IN JOPLIN... THE JOPLIN TORNADO HAS BEEN UPGRADED TO AN EF-5 TORNADO. * DATE...22 MAY 2011 * MAXIMUM EF-SCALE RATING...EF-5 * ESTIMATED MAXIMUM WIND SPEED...IN EXCESS OF 200 MPH * ESTIMATED PATH WIDTH...3/4 MILE * FATALITIES...122 * INJURIES...750 * THIS PRELIMINARY INFORMATION WAS DETERMINED BY A NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SURVEY TEAM AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE PENDING FINAL REVIEW OF THE EVENT AND PUBLICATION IN NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE STORM DATA. AN EF-5 TORNADO IMPACTED A LARGE PORTION OF THE CITY OF JOPLIN. WIND SPEEDS WERE ESTIMATED IN EXCESS OF 200 MPH. THE PATH WIDTH WAS ESTIMATED AT THREE QUARTERS OF A MILE WIDE. FOR REFERENCE...THE ENHANCED FUJITA SCALE CLASSIFIES TORNADOES INTO THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES: EF0...WIND SPEEDS 65 TO 85 MPH. EF1...WIND SPEEDS 86 TO 110 MPH. EF2...WIND SPEEDS 111 TO 135 MPH. EF3...WIND SPEEDS 136 TO 165 MPH. EF4...WIND SPEEDS 166 TO 200 MPH. EF5...WIND SPEEDS GREATER THAN 200 MPH. $$ WISE

There is a thread here dedicated to the surveys .... I don't know about the Wiki page nor who is handling it. Many of the surveys are preliminary

Same here. I wish we had a separate thread for the "what's the best way to stay alive" circling and another for the wx and science.

Well there's a pair of cells moving into and through Carroll County now ; the southmost looks to clip Atlanta. Both were TOR warned on the AL side of the border and SVR on this side. Getting thunder, lightning, and gusts in Winston/west Douglas County now. From where we are, we hear an East Carroll County siren go off when there is any warning for any part of Carroll County. It wails for a few minutes then stops. Sort of like a 25-minute-heads-up for us. The real Showtime, however, is yet to come for Atlanta.